The Mastering the Machine Workshops are a series of lectures and hands-on lab exercises with the goal of training students on system integration, design, and programming in industrial automation. In last week’s post, the process of learning industrial automation skills …
On October 12 this year at the end of a trip to the Northeast I had the pleasure of attending The Vision Show, a trade show that occurs annually in Boston, MA. You can check out my recap of the …
Earlier this week I had the privilege of attending my second Automate and Promat show in Chicago. I wrote an earlier post on the Automate 2015 show, but when I went back and re-read it I realized that I actually …
In today’s post I’m going to ask you to think of sensors in a different way. Most engineers who are specifying equipment think of sensors as discrete or analog devices, proxes or photoelectrics, flow or pressure sensors, thermocouples and the …
This week’s post is presented by Acieta, a robotics integration and automation company with facilities in Wisconsin and Iowa. This article lists some of the advances that have made the use of robots common in various manufacturing areas. ******************************************************** Robots …
Ease and Efficiency of Robotic Assembly Lines (Acieta) Read more »
Several of my topics in the past have dealt with gauging and measurement. Most of the systems I have worked on in the past used LVDTs, encoders, optical sensors or machine vision when it came to accurately measuring the physical …
This week was my first experience using vision and robots together. I have integrated many vision systems in the past and also done a number of robotic applications but this was my first time using vision to guide the robot. …
In another post I described an air filter tester built with NAS in the late 1990s. These testers were for automotive filters and generally were built around a single automation concept; a Cosmo leak tester or vision system for instance. …
This is another application done with NAS from about 1998. We did a lot of vision, gauging and leak testing applications for Tennex, a Japanese cooperative venture in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. This company has since been bought by Mahle, a German …
This was a contact lens inspection station built in 2005 for Vistakon, a Florida company. It has 2 cameras mounted to X-Y-Z axes with similarly mounted backlighting below the moving pallet. Samples would be taken from the production lines and …
